A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Refresh Gallery

I'm trying to build character but Eclipse is really confusing.

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.

It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.

And the baby has a fever.

I asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.

( MSTE ( AR ) CD )

While our commitment to recycling initiatives has been unwavering, this is not a cost any of us should be expected to pay.

I'm like the Terminator, except with love!

It all came flat-packed in Pandora's Box.

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

BUT WHAT IF I REASSURE MYSELF WITH A JOKE AND THEN DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE RASH AND IT TURNS OUT TO BE DEATH MITES AND I COULD HAVE CAUGHT IT

'Unfortunately, the notion of marriage which prevails ... at the present time ... regards the institution as simply a convenient arrangement or formal contract ... This disregard of the sanctity of marriage and contempt for its restrictions is one of the most alarming tendencies of the present age.' --John Harvey Kellogg, Ladies' guide in health and disease (1883)

wtfw it's like smho tbfh, imdb.

(c) You can have a scooter when you pay for it yourself, and (d) if you can't learn to start a new thread rather than responding to an old one, you'll be banned. [thread locked by moderator]

From Google Trends, it looks like the lag between people Googling cocktail recipes and 'hangover cure' is 14 hours.

If I get a Wii, it will be the first game console I've owned.

She also starts every letter with "Dear Future <your name>".

Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?"

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.

Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.

I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.

Tomorrow's sessions will be entirely devoted to sewing machine rotary hooks.

I'm glad to hear they're finally redefining the meter to be exactly three feet.

Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel.

For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.

The failures usually don't hurt anything, and if it installs several versions, it increases the chance that one of them is right. (Note: The 'yes' command and '2>/dev/null' are recommended additions.)

Fans eagerly await 2015's 'Space Fights: Power Gets Up', although most think 1999's 'Space Fights: The Scary Ghost' didn't live up to the hype.

Although maybe it's just a phase, like freshman year of college when I realized I could just buy frosting in a can.

[LIVE]

Sequoia Brussels sprouts are delicious but it's pretty hard to finish one.

'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

You want me to pick up waffle cones? Oh, right, for the wine. One sec, let me just derive your son's credit card number and I'll be on my way.

Ok, how many coins for a cinnamon roll?

"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."

Placeble 228 x/6n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

Nonrewritable tape?

There are two or three songs out there with beeps in the chorus that sound exactly like the clock radio alarm I had in high school, and hearing it makes me think my life since junior year has been a dream I'm about to wake up from.

On the other hand, poor Samara -- transcoded to FLV. No one deserves that.

I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.

My icebox plum trap easily captured William Carlos Williams. It took much less work than the infinite looping network of diverging paths I had to build in that yellow wood to ensnare Robert Frost.

Just make sure you don't have it maximize instead of minimize.

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

It's my most ambitious project yet, judging by the amount of guacamole.

But the rind is where all the vitamins are!

Last-minute course change: Let's see if we can hit Steve's house.

To make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower.

The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.

It's annoying that the Nastapoka Arc isn't a meteor impact crater, but I truly believe that--with enough time, effort, and determination--we could make it one.

The laws of physics are fun to try to understand, but as an organism with incredibly delicate eyes who evolved in a world full of sharp objects, I have an awful lot of trust in biology's calibration of my flinch reflex.

'All time machine systems nominal ... T-minus ten ... eleven ...'

How do I work it? IT'S ALREADY WORKING!

The top computer champion at Seven Minutes in Heaven is a Honda-built Realdoll, but to date it has been unable to outperform the human Seven Minutes in Heaven champion, Ken Jennings.

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot.

The most brutal way I've ever seen someone handle this was 'Oh, you have a girlfriend. Are you going to get married?' 'I, uh, don't know--' 'Well, do you love her?' '...' 'Anyway, what were you saying about the movie?'

The AARP puts the average age of a first-time grandparent close to 50, and the CDC has some data. But I don't have first-parent age distributions for specific names, or generational first-child age correlations, so the dotted line is just a guess. Still, let's be honest: No further research is really *needed.*

Wishbone and the Illustrated Classics series have gotten me through every conversation I've ever had about Dickens, Treasure Island, The Anarchist's Cookbook, and Our Bodies, Ourselves.

'Sorry, I left out my glass of water from last night.' OH GOD I APPARENTLY LIVE IN A GARBAGE PIT.

Rome's declaration of war against Carthage was sent from a no-reply address, so Hannibal had to cross the Alps to deliver his "UNSUBSCRIBE" response in person.

With a space elevator, a backyard full of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute.

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

Let's invite him to a party and play 'I never'. Okay, I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street. ... he's taking a drink!

Maybe there's no tenderness in her fingertips either, but at least SHE puts out.

The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!

I guess if she accepted irrational realities, she'd hardly be my fantasy.

In the future, every single pipeline will lead to the bowl of a giant blender, and we'll all just show up with a bucket each day to take our share of the resulting smoothie.

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1

He was the first person to land a 900, which is especially impressive because pulling off a half-integer spin requires obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics.

Comes with a 50-lb sack of gender changers, and also an add-on device with a voltage selector and a zillion circular center pin DC adapter tips so you can power any of those devices from the 90s.

Points to anyone who hacks the Flickr devs' computers to make their text editors do this when you click on anything.

Old people used to write obnoxious thinkpieces about how people these days always wear watches and are slaves to the clock, but now they've switched to writing thinkpieces about how kids these days don't appreciate the benefits of an old-fashioned watch. My position is: The word 'thinkpiece' sounds like a word made up by someone who didn't know about the word 'brain'.

In general you should only include your single best data point in the paper. The rest of the data can go in the supplementary materials.

The projection's north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined.

Do I get to remove letters entirely? Or just rearrange them? Because the 'k/c' situation is ridiculous. Look, we can make out whenever. This is *immortality*!

Sometimes, parts of a slowly-rising mountain suddenly rise REALLY fast, which is extra interesting.

I'm working on assembling a combination declinometer, sclerometer, viscometer, aleurometer, stalagmometer, and hypsometer. I'm making good progress according to my ometerometer, a device which shows the rate at which I'm acquiring measurement devices.

Another thing that is a bad problem is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever.

What's even worse is, a month ago they transferred me to work on the game I was already playing, and suddenly I found myself procrastinating by playing the one I'd been assigned before. It's possible they're onto me and this is all part of the plan.

Asbestos is bad; definitely get the one on the right. Wait -- this one over here has no swine flu! Now I can't decide.

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

If at least one person has a nightmare about being swarmed by hundreds of mouse-sized dromaeosaurids, my work will have been done.

Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke.

But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.

This replaces the previous solar activity watch, which was issued last month when the sun took off its sunglasses.

$1600 / 1386153BR 3BATH, MODERN SLIDING DOORS, GUEST ROOMS, GARBAGE DISPOSAL. FREE MANDATORY PARKING (ENFORCED). CONVENIENT TO ALDERAAN.

It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.

Not to go all sentence fragment on you.

Some surfaces may seem difficult to glue. But if you research the materials, find tables of what adhesives work on them, and prepare your surfaces carefully, you can fail to glue them in a fun NEW way that fills your house with dangerous vapors.

I love their cover of 1,200 Balloons, Dalmatians, and Miles.

To get more knowledge

If you tune out again, when you tune back in you'll be hearing about dusty plasma fission fragment rockets.

Gorilla, yes. Adorable golden retriever, yes. But it says nothing about meerkats.

If you had an oven bag and a dryer that runs unusually hot, I guess you could in theory make tumbled eggs.

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

They're not generally used for crewed spacecraft because astronauts HATE going around the corners.

Your problem is so terrible, I worry that, if I help you, I risk drawing the attention of whatever god of technology inflicted it on you.

'Hey, can you call my cell?' '...I'm trying, but it says this number is blocked?' 'Ok, thanks, just checking.'

I'm gonna call the cops and get Chad arrested for theft, then move all my stuff to the house across the street. Hopefully the owners there are more responsible.

Kenneth Arrow hated me because the ordering of my preferences changes based on which voting systems have what level of support. But it tells me a lot about the people I'm going to be voting with!

Not even metapneumovirus, easily the common cold virus with the coolest name, warrants our sympathy. Colds suck. No mercy.

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

I'm trying to prove that mathematics forms a meta-abelian group, which would finally confirm my suspicions that algebraic geometry and geometric algebra are the same thing.

You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.

If replacing all the '3's doesn't fix your code, remove the 4s, too, with 'ceiling(pi) / floor(pi) * pi * r^floor(pi)'. Mmm, floor pie.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. There is no road out of this oblivion; we must embrace it. We must join with the darkness. Ba'al the Annihilator offers us no happiness, no answers, naught but the cold embrace of the void. To imagine any other end is delusion. We must give in to the will of Ba'al, for he will one day consume us and our world alike. I therefore call on Congress to fully fund space exploration, and to join with Ba'al, the Eater of Souls. Thank you.

Mal, Simon, Wash, Zoe, River, Kaylee, Jayne, Inara, Book.

It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."

At this point, if we're going to keep insisting on portraying dinosaurs as featherless because it's "cooler", it's time to apply that same logic to art involving bald eagles.

Reportedly, double-walled inflatable balls like this exist somewhere. Now to find that place.

Juraaaassic Park, Juraaaassic Park, God shed his grace on theeeee

Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.

Another option: "It is an honor to be the first human to set foot on the moon."

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

I just can't wait for the Better Homes and Gardens list of helpful tips for household reuse of sixteen-inch acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene phalluses.

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

One of these days me and Joey Comeau will get around to subverting the hetero-normative paradigm and fixing all this.

It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

Don't worry, the dogs are all fine. That's actually kind of the problem.

I have accidentally watered virtually every person and object in Pelican Town.

Don't forget to add another term for "probability that the Modified Bayes' Theorem is correct."

The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...

I don't remember her name at all, but she fell asleep on the floor in front of me.

As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.

And every day it gets harder to fight the urge to su to the user and freak people out.

But we don't need to worry about the boiling masses sandwiching the thin layer in which we live, since we're so fragile and short-lived that it's unlikely to kill us before something else does! Wait, why doesn't that sound reassuring?

And then in a twinkling, a sound gave me pause / From the roof came the scratching of eight tarsal claws.

I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It's interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION

The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction.

The experimental math department's budget is under scrutiny for how much they've been spending on trains leaving Chicago at 9:00pm traveling at 45 mph.

My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.

It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)

Then I'm going to go on a weeks-long somatic hypermutation bender, producing ever-more targeted antibodies, while I continue to remain distanced and follow guidance from public health authorities.

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

At my OLD school, we used Microsoft Encarta 2005.

You can also try 'Yikes.'

Honestly feel a little sheepish about the amount of time and effort I spent confirming "yes, the vaccine helps protect people from getting sick and dying" but I guess everyone needs a hobby.

You say this daily walk will reduce my risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 30%, but also increase my risk of death by bear attack by 300%? That's a 280% increased! I'm not a sucker; I'm staying inside.

Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

Also possibly several miles beyond that.

A long, long time (plus 40 years) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (plus a corrective factor involving the Hubble constant) ...

I read in this one article that the breaking of electroweak symmetry is the reason we have SOULS. This guy with a degree said so!

My resonant tunneling diode phone has limited range but a short enough wavelength to penetrate even the densest cages. This gives me a major combat advantage, hopefully.

Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

Just pretend you're kidding.

You should start giving out 'E's so I can spell FACADE or DEFACED.

Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.

If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis.

In order to carry the necessary crafting supplies, they built the ships at 12:1 scale.

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

It's crazy how much my gut opinion of a movie/song is swayed by what other people say, regardless of how I felt coming out of the theater.

To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.

We understand your privacy concerns; be assured that our phones will never store or transmit images of your face.

Since delays should get less likely closer to the launch, most astronomers in 2018 believed the expansion of the schedule was slowing, but by early 2020 new measurements indicated that it was actually accelerating.

Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.

Could be worse. The last guy in that situation fell for one of the transient trumpeting angels.

SMS is just the worst, but I'm having trouble convincing people to adopt my preferred system, TLS IRC with a local server and a patched DOSBox gateway running in my mobile browser.

'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'

I understand large sample sizes are key to a low standard error of the mean, but the entire sophomore class?

Way to not support the GMA 950 under OS X, Spore. :(

There's still a chance you were conceived via IVF. But we've checked your mom's college yearbook photos, and whether or not she and your father had sex, it's clear that ... listen, I know this is hard for you.

I always have to turn off nature documentaries when they show these scenes.

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

Abel and Steve would've been fine! I like Steve!

Maybe someday I'll get to write the Wikipedia article about this place! Wait, damn, original research.

I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".

Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.

I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.

Under some circumstances, if you throw a D8 and then a D12 at an enemy, thanks to the D8's greater pointiness you actually have to roll a D12 and D8 respectively to determine damage.

But THIS guy, he might be for real!

The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.

It's much better than the other one.

And I even got out my adorable new netbook!

I don't care what the research says. Everybody knows you should drink 3,000 glasses of water a day and change your oil every 8 miles.

Luckily, the damages were partly offset by the prize money we got from accidentally winning the nearby water skiing championship tournament.

It's important to learn the moves that take you into the vortex, but it's best not to study vortex itself too closely. Even grandmasters who have built up a tolerance lose the ability to play for a few hours after studying it.

My bold criticism might anger the hot air balloon people, which would be a real concern if any of them lived along a very narrow line directly upwind of me.

'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'

The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

The Earth's magnetic field is primarily generated by currents in the liquid outer core, though some geophysicists argue that an unexplained mismatch with models suggests that the Kinder toy contains a magnet.

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

"Mr. President, what if the unthinkable happens? What if the launch goes wrong, and Napoleon is not stranded on the Moon?" "Have Safire write up a speech."

So as not to leave you hanging -- it was a problem with select() calls.

My hobby: Pretending to miss the sarcasm when people show off their lack of interest in football by talking about 'sportsball' and acting excited to find someone else who's interested, then acting confused when they try to clarify.

Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.

"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over."